A blog from the Professor of Practical Project Management

Month: April 2017

Issues are any event or known problem that will negatively impact your project’s schedule, scope, budget or quality. Issues differ from Risks in that Issues are 100% will or has happened whereas Risks may or may not happen with a probability less than 100% and greater than 0%. Risks that are not actively managed are more likely to become Issues.

At Project Charter time, you want to highlight the most severe impacting issues. Look specifically for the impacts in the following areas:

Like this:

In upcoming posts I will discuss Risk Identification and Management in detail. For now, you just need to know that a risk is an uncertain future event that can have a negative impact on your project’s schedule, scope, budget or quality. The event has a probability of occurring less than 100% and greater than 0%. If the probability is 100%, then you have an issue, not a risk. Some risks can have a positive impact but we will not discuss that here.

You state the risk as follows:

If <risk event> occurs, then <state the outcome that affects your project> causing the project to be impacted in the following specific ways <scope, schedule, budget, quality>.

At the Project Charter level, you are interested in identifying only the highest impact risks so that your risk management strategies can be accounted for in the scope and schedule.

Some Project Charters will list “Assumptions” in its own section. I have eliminated assumptions from my own charter template as I feel if you have assumptions that can impact your project, then that is just another form of risk. I now include any assumptions in my risk section.

Like this:

Project Stakeholders are the people and entities affected or impacted in any way by the project. Defining this list is critical in communication planning. It will also help you in defining the project scope. Stakeholders are identified by reviewing the Project Scope and consulting with Subject Matter Experts for the domain of the project.

There are two classifications of Stakeholders:

Those that will be needed to perform project tasks.

Those that will interact with or receive the product, service or result of the project.

The Stakeholders in classification 1 are the members of your project team. Some of these will constitute your core team and will be needed full-time or near full-time for the duration of the project. Others will be needed only for specific tasks over limited periods of time. When you have this list I recommend creating a spreadsheet with these names along with their roles, responsibilities, manager, and contact information.

The Stakeholders in classification 2 are your project’s “customers”. These are the people who will be the target of a formal Change Management strategy (more on that in upcoming posts). The success of your project will often depend on how you manage communication and change with this group of Stakeholders. The five key areas for managing this group of Stakeholders are:

Awareness – communicate early and often with this group before they are impacted

Desire – impart an understanding of why this is good for them and for the company

Knowledge – training in new processes and behaviors

Ability – make them successful by setting up a support structure

Reinforcement – monitoring the expected behaviors and business outcomes and being prepared to make adjustments as new knowledge comes to light

There are some Stakeholders that can be a member of both groups. Typically members of the Project Sponsor’s team will participate in the project and also be affected by the result.